Author: Gerald Kersh (1911-68) was born into a large Jewish immigrant family in Teddington, Middlesex, and, after a string of odd jobs, published his first novel, Jews Without Jehovah, in 1934. (Four of his relations subsequently sued him for defamation after claiming he based characters on them.) Night and the City appeared in 1938. Kersh combined prolific short story writing with lucrative freelance journalism, before seeing service during the second world war. After being wounded, he was asked by the War Office to write a propaganda book about basic training; it became the bestselling They Died With Their Boots Clean (1941). After the war, Kersh moved abroad, settling in the US where he continued to write and, despite serious illness, completed Fowler's End (1957), a scabrous account of a London cinema owner. But his commercial successes were well behind him and he died of throat cancer in 1968.

The story: Soho wideboy Harry Fabian is the protagonist of a story set during the run-up to George VI's coronation in 1937. Accoutred with a fake American accent, flashy suits and a prostitute girlfriend, Fabian develops a scheme to promote wrestling, by persuading a retired veteran, Ali the Terrible Turk, to take on the Greek wrestler Kration. He also entices a club hostess, Helen, away from her sculptor boyfriend. But Fabian's wrestling scheme unravels when Ali dies shortly after the bout, and, chronically short of cash, he plans to sell his girl to a "white slaver". Before he can put any more schemes into action, however, Fabian is arrested as part of a pre-coronation clean-up.

Film-makers: Jules Dassin (b1911) started off in a Yiddish workers' theatre in New York, before being hired by MGM as a contract director in 1941. He was fired by Louis B Mayer, however, and as an independent had a huge success with The Naked City (1948). But Dassin ran into problems with the McCarthy-era blacklist, and was sent to Britain to make Night and the City by producer Darryl F Zanuck, who also supplied an American lead: Richard Widmark, then best known for heavies like Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death (1947) and Jefty Robbins in Road House (1948). Dassin's Hollywood career ended in 1952 - his next film would be the French thriller Rififi (1955).

How book and film compare: Kersh's novel is radically refashioned. Fabian is no longer a fake-to-the-core Brit, but an American outsider trying to break in. The wrestling element is retained, presumably for its gritty, noirish value, but it is now made the subject of a revenge plot - the veteran grappler is the father of a rival promoter, and his death the trigger for Fabian's own dramatic killing. At the last minute Dassin wrote in a role for Gene Tierney, star of Laura (1944), and invented a new girlfriend for Fabian, a nightclub singer. Fabian also becomes entangled with the club-owner's wife, played by Googie Withers, who wants to set up her own establishment.

Inspirations and influences: Night and the City is a key entry in the small band of British films noirs, alongside Brighton Rock (1947), They Made Me a Fugitive (1947) and The Third Man (1949). Though it was received poorly by critics (Dilys Powell called it "as British as Sing-Sing"), it remains the genre's most definitive treatment of the London landscape. Kersh's influence extends elsewhere: his 1943 short story The Horrible Dummy inspired the ventriloquist's dummy section in Dead of Night (1945).